The political leader of the German Communist Party, the KPD was born in the city of Hamburg in 1886. Ernst Thälmann was called up in 1915 to fight in the German imperial army during the First World War.
Thälmann belonged to the working class. In the years before the outbreak of the war he had been a stevedorer at the Hamburg docks, where he worked loading and unloading ships. It was at this time when he began his political militancy. In 1903 he joined the German Social Democratic Party.
Despite his relatively moderate militancy, the war strongly influenced Ernts Thälmann like thousands of other men who watched death from the trenches. In 1917, still serving as a soldier, he joined the independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1918 he participated in the uprisings of army units in the face of discontent over the world war and ended up deserting his unit.
After the war, Thälmann became even more radical. In 1920 he was one of the founding members of the KPD, the German Communist Party, of which he would be a representative in the Reichstag between 1925 and 1933. In 1932 he ran for President of Germany at the same time as Marshal Paul von Hindemburg and Adolf Hitler.
A few days after the Nazi Party came to power, Thälmann was arrested by the German police. He would never be free again. For the next eleven years he was locked up in different prisons and concentration camps. Finally on August 18, 1944 he was assassinated by SS agents in the Buchenwald concentration camp, near the city of Weimar.
The last residence of Ernst Thälmann in Hamburg, the city for which he had been a deputy in the German parliament before the advent of Nazi Germany, is today a memorial museum in memory of this political activist and founding leader of the German Communist Party.
How to get to the Ernst Thälmann Memorial
The Ernst Thälmann Memorial House is located on Tarpenbek Street, north of the city of Hamburg. To get there you can take the underground line U1 to the Hudtwalckerstraße stop.